Boomers

The world is in an insane place right now, and almost everyone living inside it treats the insanity as the default state of civilization. It is not. The insanity is a transition, and we are regressing to the historical mean. Understanding why the current arrangement looks the way it does requires understanding the generation that produced it, and that generation is the boomers — the most consequential, most complicated, and most over-credited cohort in modern American history.

The conversation about boomers tends to collapse into two stupid positions: the greatest generation built America and you should be grateful, or boomers ruined everything and deserve no forgiveness. Both are wrong. The truth is more interesting, more important, and easier to act on once you can see it.

The anomaly they grew up inside

World War II was a uniquely transformative event in human history, and the post-war American boom was its uniquely lopsided economic consequence. The war destroyed the industrial base of essentially every major economy on Earth — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union — leaving the United States as the only fully intact industrial power on a planet that desperately needed manufactured goods. This produced, for roughly three decades, an economic anomaly with no historical precedent. American factories ran flat out. American wages climbed steadily. A single-income family could afford a house, a car, college tuition for the children, and a comfortable retirement. The labor share of national income was high. Housing was a sane multiple of household earnings. Public institutions worked. Public infrastructure got built. The country was, in a real and limited sense, the most prosperous large society in human history.

The boomers grew up inside this. They were born into it. They never saw any other arrangement. They reasonably concluded, the way any humans raised inside a unique window conclude, that the conditions they had grown up inside were the natural state of the world rather than a temporary post-war anomaly. They built their adult lives, their politics, and their expectations on assumptions that the conditions producing those assumptions would persist. The conditions did not persist. The rest of the world rebuilt. The competitive landscape returned to historical normal. The anomaly closed. The assumptions remained.

This is the context for everything that follows. The boomers aren’t cartoon villains. They’re humans who lived inside an anomaly, mistook it for the new normal, and built a worldview the universe was never going to be obligated to maintain. The bills for that mistake are coming due on their children and grandchildren.

Before the sins, the credit. The cartoon version of the argument misses the parts the generation got right.

A meaningful fraction of boomers worked very hard for a long time. They built businesses, raised families, served their communities, did the actual labor that produced the wealth America still runs on the inertia of. The cohort produced enormous numbers of capable engineers, scientists, doctors, teachers, and tradespeople. The civil-rights legislation, the environmental cleanup of the worst pollutants, the buildout of the modern technical infrastructure, the spread of higher education, the eradication of several diseases — these are real, and they were largely accomplished by boomers in their working years.

The athletic, disciplined boomers — the ones who stayed lean, kept moving, kept learning, kept showing up — are some of the most impressive elders I know. The seventy-year-old who is still biking fifty miles a week, the seventy-five-year-old in better shape than most thirty-five-year-olds, the eighty-year-old grandfather who lifts heavy three days a week — these people exist in numbers, and they are a real argument for what a human body can do when its owner refuses to coast.

The cohort is also responsible for the financial discipline of a meaningful subset who lived within their means, paid off their houses, invested steadily, and arrived at retirement with real wealth they had genuinely earned. The capable subset of the boomer generation is one of the most capable subsets of any generation in modern history.

This part has to be on the table before the rest of the conversation makes sense. The generation is complicated. The complications matter. Then come the sins.

Sin one: housing as asset

The first structural sin is housing.

Sometime between 1945 and the late 1970s, the cultural and policy framework around housing in America underwent a quiet and consequential shift. A house is, physically, a depreciating structure on a piece of land. The structure wears out and requires constant maintenance. The land may or may not appreciate, depending on what the surrounding economy does. A house, in any honest accounting, is a liability that produces a service — shelter — for its owner. It is not an investment vehicle.

The boomers and their parents, with enormous and bipartisan policy support, redefined the primary residence as the central retirement asset of the American household. Mortgage interest became tax-deductible. Government-sponsored entities guaranteed the underlying loans, suppressing the cost of borrowing far below what an unsubsidized market would have produced. Zoning rules — the granular, municipal kind that determine what can be built where — were tightened almost everywhere to restrict new supply. Subsidized demand plus restricted supply produced, predictably and inevitably, decades of price appreciation in residential real estate. The boomer generation, having bought houses cheap before this engine was fully running, watched their “asset” appreciate at multiples of the broader economy and concluded that the appreciation was a feature of the universe rather than a policy-engineered transfer from future buyers to current owners.

The math of this was known by the 1980s. Anyone willing to look at supply curves, demographic trends, and the trajectory of the mortgage interest deduction could see that home prices were on a path that would, within a generation, make ownership inaccessible to median earners in the most economically productive parts of the country. This was not a surprise that snuck up on policymakers. This was an engineered outcome with a known endgame, and the endgame is the affordability crisis the boomers’ grandchildren are now living inside.

Compounding it is what happened to the household structure. Multi-generational housing — three or four generations under one roof, grandparents helping raise grandchildren, adult children helping aging parents, knowledge and labor distributed across the household — has been the historical default in almost every human culture for most of human history. The American postwar arrangement made multi-generational housing socially unfashionable. Children left at eighteen and did not come back. Parents moved to retirement communities. Grandparents saw grandchildren on holidays. The atomized nuclear household became the cultural norm, which meant the cost structure of housing was paid four or five times over by the same extended family that, in previous arrangements, would have shared one. The “starter home” was invented. Then the “trade up.” Then the “downsize.” Each transition extracted equity, generated tax revenue, generated agent commissions, generated mortgage interest — and produced an old-age population isolated from their grandchildren in a way that is now widely understood to be terrible for the elderly themselves.

We have known how to fix this for forty years. Build more housing, especially in productive cities, and make multi-generational arrangements legally and culturally normal again. The boomers as a voting bloc have, in most municipalities, opposed both, because both threaten the appreciation of their primary “asset.” That is the engineered sin. It is foreseeable, it is documented, and it is still being committed in zoning meetings in every American city this week.

Sin two: reliance on comfort

The second sin is the elevation of comfort to the status of a life goal.

The boomer generation had access to the most rapid expansion of consumer comfort in human history. Air conditioning everywhere. Climate-controlled cars between climate-controlled buildings. Food delivered to the door. Television in every room. Medications for every discomfort, increasingly available without a doctor’s visit. Replacement joints. Statins. SSRIs. The entire pharmacological and technological apparatus of postponed consequences.

A subset of boomers used this expansion intelligently. They took the medical advances, married them to discipline, and produced bodies that are still working in their seventies. These are the impressive ones I have already credited. Their lives are an existence proof that comfort, applied with judgement, extends the productive human span.

The much larger subset took the comfort as the goal itself. They reclined. They stopped moving. They ate the engineered food. They watched the television. They took the medications instead of fixing the conditions the medications were treating. They arrived at retirement age in bodies that could no longer do what their bodies had been built to do, and they spent the next twenty or thirty years progressively decomposing inside a healthcare system that — and this is the part that is going to age very badly in the historical record — they did not pay for.

Medicare is the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history. The math is stark. The average Medicare beneficiary receives several multiples in benefits of what they paid in through payroll taxes during their working years. The shortfall is paid by the current working population, which means it is paid by the children and grandchildren of the beneficiaries. The program has been running since 1965. Its unfunded actuarial obligations now run into the tens of trillions of dollars. The people who created and benefit from the program will, in the cohort’s twilight years, consume a higher fraction of the federal budget than national defense, while the working population funding those benefits accumulates less wealth, owns less housing, and has fewer children of its own to fund the next round of the program.

This is not the boomers’ moral fault as individuals. They voted for the politicians who built the program. They paid the payroll tax they were told to pay. They used the benefits they were told they had earned. The system was designed to look like a savings account and to function like a transfer from the young to the old, and most beneficiaries never had to examine the difference. But the system is a transfer, the transfer is enormous, and the cohort that consumed it as a default while letting its own bodies atrophy is going to be looked back on as the cohort that revealed, by their late-life data, what comfort as the end of striving actually produces. The data is not good. The lesson, for the rest of us, is exactly the foundation argument this site keeps making: the body needs to be used or the body falls apart, and no amount of medical comfort substitutes for the body’s own work.

The boomers are the transition generation that ran the experiment of comfort-as-goal at population scale. The results are in. They are a warning, not a model.

Sin three: materialism

The third sin is materialism, which is the greatest enslaver any of us could imagine.

The boomer generation was the first cohort in human history to be marketed to, continuously, from cradle to grave, by an industrial apparatus that had spent a century perfecting the conversion of attention into desire and desire into purchase. They were the first generation to grow up with television advertising. They were the first to inherit a credit system structured to monetize their willingness to want. They were the first whose entire identity formation occurred inside a consumer environment whose central premise was that the thing you had was less satisfying than the thing you were about to buy.

This produced, in the aggregate, a culture in which stuff became identity. Not stuff as in tools, or as in property held to enable a life — stuff as in the constant flow of consumer goods through the household, purchased on credit, used briefly, replaced with newer versions, stored in basements and garages, eventually rented out to storage units. The American self-storage industry is a monument to the boomer relationship with material objects. Forty thousand facilities. Two billion square feet of climate-controlled storage. Most of it filled with possessions whose owners cannot bring themselves to throw away and cannot bring themselves to use. The civilization of stuff.

Materialism is the greatest enslaver because it converts time directly into objects, and objects do not give the time back. You spent the hours earning the money to buy the thing. The thing sits in your house. The thing does not return the hours. Worse, the thing requires hours of its own — to maintain, to insure, to store, to upgrade, to organize, eventually to dispose of. Every object in your household is a small ongoing tax on your remaining life. The boomers, raised inside the apparatus that taught them stuff was happiness, accumulated stuff at an unprecedented rate, and many of them are now spending their seventies and eighties trying to figure out what to do with it, knowing their children do not want it and the secondhand market will not pay for it.

This is the slavery the rest of the site has been arguing against made physical and household-scale. The chain is not a boss; the chain is the credenza you have to dust, the boat you store six months a year, the second home you visit twice annually, the closet of clothes you cannot wear, the garage of tools you used once. The chain is the entire portfolio of objects the marketing told you would be the answer and that turned out, instead, to be the question — what is all of this for, and why did I spend my life buying it?

The boomers were sold the lie at industrial scale. They believed it. They are not the first humans to fall for marketing, but they are the first cohort whose entire emotional and identity infrastructure was built inside marketing from infancy. The fallout is a generation of late-life adults sitting on enormous piles of possessions that produced very little meaning, surrounded by an economy still trying to sell them more.

Forgiveness and responsibility

So what do we do with all of this.

The first move is forgiveness, in the operational sense. Forgiveness here is not a moral concession. It is a refusal to spend our hours litigating sins we cannot reverse. The boomers did what they did inside the conditions they were inside. We can extract the lessons — they are large, they are clear, and they are the lessons I am writing all these essays around — and we can put down the resentment, because the resentment buys nothing back and it costs our own remaining time, which is the only resource any of us actually have.

The second move is responsibility, which is the part that does not get forgiven. The fallout is ours to handle. The housing system has to be repaired, by building more housing, by re-normalizing multi-generational arrangements, by refusing to vote our personal real-estate appreciation against the next generation’s ability to form households. The Medicare transfer has to be reformed, by gradual means-testing and by a generational understanding that the deal cannot be repeated in its current form. The relationship with stuff has to be unwound, one household at a time, by refusing to buy what the marketing tells you to buy and by accepting that meaning does not come in cardboard boxes.

These are large, generational fixes. They are also entirely within the gift of the people reading this. You do not need permission to refuse materialism. You do not need a policy change to take in your aging parents. You do not need a political movement to start lifting heavy in your fifties so that you are not Medicare’s biggest customer in your seventies. The collective fix is built from individual decisions. The collective is in the mirror.

The boomers are a complicated cohort. They lived through a unique window. They got real things right and they got large things wrong. The wrong things produced bills now sitting on our table. The bills are payable. The question is whether we pay them honestly, or whether the next cohort hands the same bills, with interest, to their children. I’d prefer we pay them.